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Please join us this Friday, October 4 at noon as we welcome Chris Danforth, PhD for a presentation entitled " http://hedonometer.org -- Remote Sensing of Emotional States in Real-Time". Chris Danforth is associate professor in the department of mathematics and statistics and complex systems center. He co-directs the Computational Story Lab, a group of applied mathematicians at the undergraduate, Masters, PhD, and Postdoctoral level working on system-scale problems in many fields including sociology, nonlinear dynamics, networks, ecology, and physics. His research has been covered by the New York Times, Science Magazine, and the BBC among others. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website: http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort or his blog http://onehappybird.com Here is the abstract to Friday's presentation. Using human evaluation of the happiness of words, we analyze a diverse set of large-scale texts which reflect cultural experience including 50 years of music lyrics, millions of weblogs, and billions of status updates from Twitter. We find that happiness rises and falls with age and distance from the Earth's equator; the 2008 Presidential Election was the happiest day in the blogosphere in the last 5 years; and that a diverse collection of languages exhibit a pro-social bias. We also investigate how happiness is related to geospatial information, demographics, and network topology. What are the happiest cities? What do words tell us about human behavior? Does your happiness correlate with that of your friends? This talk will discuss the findings in the context of our ongoing effort in the Computational Story Lab at UVM to develop a remote sensor of population level happiness: the 'Hedonometer'. We hope you can join us! Sylvie Frisbie Program Specialist Center for Clinical and Translational Science College of Medicine - Given Courtyard S461 89 Beaumont Ave. Burlington, VT 05405 802-656-4560